I'll kick off the first one for December 2011 as a "dummy run". And it starts ... Now!

Topic for December is "Happy Faces" which shouldn't be too hard with the holiday season fast approaching - as long as you avoid the self-portraits Christmas morning (when you discover that all your hints about that new K-5 didn't bear fruit )

[ And Topic for the 1st real challenge in Jan 2012 is "Sad transport" and you can start taking pictures for that one 15th Dec. ]

As well as a thread for each month/Challenge which is for discussion purposes only, there will also be a Photo Gallery Challenge Album for the submitted images. The Photo Gallery imposes a 800px max dimension, so should keep all the images to a consistent size. Every member, if they wish, can rate each image in the Photo Gallery and/or leave a short comment - dissertations go in the discussion thread please. The Gallery will display in date order during the Challenge, and in Rating order after.

At the end of each calendar month the winner of the previous month's competition gets to make the final selection of the winner, and optionally 1 or 2 runners up. Each winner of the prior month's challenge gets to be the judge - and therefore is barred from entry for that month. The Judge can take into account the feedback of the other members, indeed it will be hard to ignore, but they do not have to follow the members' choice.

[ As there is no November winner there will only be a people's choice for this "dummy run' in December. The main purpose of which is to ensure that everything operates as planned. ]

So each month the Judge's #1, the Judge's #2 and #3 if selected, and the People's Choice #1 will go into the Annual Competition results which will be an Article or series of Articles with roughly 3 to 4 x 12 images by the end of the year.

The Judge and the membership have 2 weeks to complete the adjudication process, after which the Judge gets to pick the topic for the following month's challenge.

To clarify the timescale:

Topic is available mid-month prior (eg. mid-Nov for Dec Challenge)
Entries close end of month (ie. end Dec)
Judging/rating by no later than middle of the following month (mid-Jan)
Topic for next month available mid-month (eg. mid-Jan for Feb challenge)

So in effect we'll have overlapping 2 challenges at any one time - subject to enough participants.

To ensure the spirit of the challenge we do need to cover some basics:

All images must be uploaded with EXIF data intact

Use a Pentax camera body

Photographed within the approx. 6 weeks that the challenge is open for

Copyright must belong to the submitter

Copyright remains with the submitter

But the 3 or 4 winning images must stay on this site

And by entering you are committing yourself for availability to judge the next month's Challenge some time during the scheduled 2 weeks and setting the next Challenge topic - should you win the Judge's pick.

The Challenge forum and the Challenge Albums will be Members Only. The winners Articles will likely be open to viewing by all of the 'Net.